Are the kids really all right? The popular2010 movie about a lesbian couple and their teenage children conceived by artificial insemination suggested that they were, and that the ups and downs of a lesbian family were just like those in a normal heterosexual family. There was nothing unusual about the type of behaviour the kids displayed or the mental states that went with it.

Many academic studies of same-sex families have arrived at the same conclusion. A new study finds that children with same-sex parents even had a slightly lower rate of depression in their mid-teens than their peers in general. But that, unfortunately, is the sole nugget of good news for the “no differences” theory in this study: by the age of 28 the same individuals were more than twice as likely (2.25 times) to suffer depression as the general run of their peers.

Why? Were there earlier experiences that could explain later onset depression? No-one had previously examined this relationship, says sociologist Paul Sullins of the Catholic University of America. “My new study tests whether this inattention is supportable.”

Sullins has previously analysed data for the younger children of same-sex parents, finding that they suffer twice as many emotional problems as do children with opposite-sex parents, and four times the emotional problems of children raised by their own joint biological parents. In another study he found that ADHD is also twice as common among these children. […]